Beginning of the Journey to the South

 

Beginning the Journey

When does someone start traveling to a place? Does it happen before one arrives? Does it happen through mass media, including books and periodicals, through stories one learns as a child? Or does it happen the first time one physically sets foot in that place?

Let’s assume I had mentally visited Mexico before actually going there. What did my brain know prior to March of 1982? What was my mental Mexico? Was it more Clint Eastwood’s western vistas of wide sombrero wearing, gun-slinging, mustachioed, dark-skinned horse riding “banditos”? Was it Speedy Gonzalez and his lazy mouse friends, stuck in the desert heat as he irrepressibly flitted about with his colorful verbal cries of “arriba, arriba, andale”? Was it an impression of Mexico given to me by a third grade private Spanish teacher, from Spain but sharing the culture of the greater Spanish speaking world, introducing fascinating words like rojo and azul, and even amarillo? Was it a misunderstanding of my childhood favorite film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, of two cool criminals ending up wandering about a strange Hispanic land called Bolivia but indistinguishable in a child’s mind from anything Mexican? Or was it a few words and images shared on Sesame Street, perhaps more Puerto Rican in pure culture but introducing a Chicano flavor nonetheless?

What was my Mexico? Did I read something about it in my textbook readers? Did I ever read a short story taking place there? Did I read in the Latter-day Saint children’s magazine The Friend, that Mexican children receive Christmas presents magically in their shoes left outside the front door? Or was that something that my 10 year-old Church primary teacher taught me upon returning from far-off Mexico, in order to adopt a little brown Mexican baby? Was it a map I saw, or were there photos I saw in the National Geographic that we subscribed to throughout my childhood? Was it the entries in the World Book Encyclopedia that showed pictures of distant places like Mexico and displayed wonderful colored illustrations of foreign dress from across the world? Did I see any of Mexico in picture or storybooks before actually going there? Had I heard stories? Had I gleaned any of the knowledge of it through history at home or school? Or perhaps a movie, or the national news with Walter Cronkite seared some unconscious images into my brain and thought patterns? Was it the spirit of a wooden deer that Sister Stevenson brought back from their sojourn for the baby, a thoughtful souvenir from a southern clime where people hand carve these smooth yet sharp reflections of indigenous culture?

I cannot be sure how much of this brought me to Mexico in anticipation of 1982. Perhaps it was the visits to a few fast food restaurants like Taco John’s and Taco Bell? Or maybe it was the “Mexican food night” our family would traditionally enjoy week in and week out. Each of my family members would use the various ingredients to our individual liking: dried taco shells, Doritos, spicy ground hamburger (always the most scarce commodity), chopped lettuce bits, chopped tomato bits, grated American cheese, maybe some chopped onion bits and the ever popular canned-corn kernels. My father would mix these all together and eat them with a fork, a la “taco salad’. I would scoop up the tasty mix with the parts of my broken taco shells. The toasted shells were hard like the Doritos but would not stain my fingers as annoyingly. Licking your fingers of Dorito dust is OK sometimes, but when you have a feast of mixed burger, cheese, corn, etc., it is nice to be able to scoop up the feast unimpeded.

Spring of 1982

I had visited outside of the United States on numerous occasions growing up, but it was normally limited to the northern provinces of Canada: Ontario a number of times, and once in Quebec, the Maritime Provinces of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, and Alberta. Despite my fond memories of the otherness of these locales, Mexico loomed ahead as a new adventure, especially since the language spoken there was to coincide with my third grade cultural experience of learning enero, febrero, marzo, etc. This was spring break, a time customarily of either traveling the ten hours to Washington D.C. or perhaps a short trip to the caves of Kentucky. To travel on such a major southward trek was a new and wonderful adventure, much like the experience of Bilbo Baggins of whom I was reading in Tolkien’s The Hobbit at that age.

This trip was an idea from my father to be sure. During his U.S Air Force duty, he was stationed near Corpus Christi and he felt it would serve as a nice warm spot to spend a week away from the northern climes of Indiana. After all, there had been many a March blizzard that had provided for tortuous prolonged winters in our hometown of Bloomington during spring break. The Texas Gulf Coast would be mild and sunny, and close to the real south (Mexico). Did I know then we would take a day trip across the border? Probably yes. Had my Dad done this during his stay in Texas years before? I can’t recall, but his specialty was West African Krio, not Spanish. This language was my specialty: I could even count to a hundred in Spanish! Mexico seemed like a natural place to look forward to, especially with my interest linguistically and romantically for really “foreign” places.

It might have been Ruby Bumzahem who inspired my early desire to learn this Romantic tongue. She was from Panama originally and would still utter phrases in Spanish (or Italian) as an elderly naturalized citizen. She became my adopted grandma and years later after living for two years in South America I don’t think I had fully returned home until I visited her in her toasty warm apartment full of pictures and Latino relics and most of all her graceful Latino demeanor.

The trip down to Corpus Christi was a memorable one. Sometimes the better you know your own country the more you can observe elsewhere.

We embarked as a family of five with a young man named Phil Isom. He had returned home to Bloomington shortly for the death of his father while serving his mission in Fort Worth, Texas. This was on our way so it wasn’t hard to drop him off at a Fort Worth stake center somewhere in the suburbs of the city.

Prior to Texas we drove through Oklahoma, a significant state for me because my main crush of my elementary school years had a grandmother there and she would spend vacations there riding horses in the country and bragging about it. I paid close attention when she would inform us about Oklahoma, not only because I liked her so much but also Marnie was part Cherokee due to her more full-blooded Oklahoma grandma, and I thought American Indians were the coolest. Our station wagon made one stop of recollection in the whole state, at a diner somewhere near Oklahoma City. This was the first time in my recollection that I had had southern grits, and the funny thing was I didn’t even order them!